Search Results for: sacher

Product Review: The Brod & Taylor Folding Proofer

As home cooks and bakers get more sophisticated, they’re becoming increasingly frustrated by the limitations of their standard array of kitchen appliances, i.e. the contemporary quartet of refrigerator, freezer, oven and microwave. They see the results professional culinarians get from subtle manipulations of temperature and they want the same thing at home. Up until very recently, the vast majority of us have been completely out of luck on that front.

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Hello Austria

Reader Tom writes in from Vienna: The Rehrücken is traditionally part of the Austrian confection of pastry, like Sacher Torte. Yet I have no evidence to prove it except it is really traditional. [Your recipe] is kind of strange because of the ginger, which is definetly not part of any Rehrücken-recipe here. Same goes for […]

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Rehrücken Recipe

There are lots of recipes out there for rehrücken if you start hunting around a bit. Most are simple bundt-style, extra-moist chocolate cakes that just happen to be made in a rehrücken mold. I prefer this formula by Austrian pastry chef Stephan Franz since it’s a spongecake, which makes it closer in spirit to the […]

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A little last wave of the flag.

If I have any regrets about last week’s interview with Rose Levy Beranbaum it’s that I didn’t engage her more on the subject of Continental pastry-making and the relationship of American baking to it. I wish I’d delved a little deeper, since she had some surprisingly strong feelings on the matter. One thing that’s stayed […]

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How to Cut a Cake

This is one of those tasks most people assume they already know how to perform. However after receiving some emails about slipping and/or sliding glazes during Sacher torte week, I think a tutorial on this subject is warranted. For as with most things there’s a right way to cut a cake and a wrong way. […]

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The dryness issue, revisited revisited

Reader Herman S. weighs in from Belgium: Could it be that the dryness problem is also a cultural issue? Indeed the advent of American coca cola started a proces by which European drinkers, or at least the Belgian ones, want sweeter beers. And thus, more and more old Belgian beers are now ‘restyled’ and become […]

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The dryness issue, revisited

As expected, Gerhard’s comments on Sacher torte elicited a large number of responses, most of which broke down into two camps, those who believed his argument that Sacher torte is supposed to be dry, as exemplifed by reader Chana… Interesting are Gerhard’s comments on the intentional “dryness” of a Sacher torte. So maybe the piece […]

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Holiday Mailbag II: The Return of Gerhard

Well, he couldn’t stay on vacation forever. My comeuppance was inevitable. Here is what a true Sacher torte aficionado (and home baker) has to say about what went on here last week. * The combination of those three components (flour, meringue and “mayonaise”) for Sacher Torte batter is the foundation of all good Viennese cake-baking. […]

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Holiday Mailbag I

Martha writes in from Amsterdam: Someone very nice brought a Demel chocolate Torte from Vienna for our Christmas dinner in Amsterdam. It came daintily packed in a signed wooden box. I had never tasted a “real” one before, and it was very nice and not really dry or dryish, although we did have whipped cream […]

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And while we’re on the subject…

One of the chief complaints Viennese bakers have about American Sacher tortes (and believe me, they have a lot of them) is that they lack the bitter tang of their Viennese cousins. This they usually attribute to the chocolate, since we here in America tend to prefer mellower-tasting chocolates than folks on the continent, or […]

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